Viewing thumbnail resources as 3D objects

[terry harrison]

I've just upgraded to V11.5 from 10 (I know, just missed the 12 upgrade, thanks Nemetcheck!)and now the thumbnails in resources (metals, plastics, glass) only show as a flat colour, whereas before they use to show as a 3D object, a sphere for instance. The VV10 view was far more useful. How can I get V11 to show the resources as 3D shapes?

[islandmon]

In the olden days there existed different 'isolated' specific texture procedures for Plane, Perimeter, Cylinder & Sphere ... they were type cast and not interchangeable becuase of the 'closed' methodology of the program . With the introduction of v11 texture mapping became much more user friendly via linkages to the OIP 'mapping' methods 9 a major step forward this). Hence , no longer a need for declared mapping types other than 'image' & 'texture' in the Resources Browser. Now each textured surface can be mapped via all possible algorithmic scenarios from the OIP. Kool ...

[Dave Donley]

Hello Terry:

In 11.5 we standardized to the "Flat" preview object choice in the Edit Texture dialog for the texture resource thumbnail. One reason was so that the thumbnails looked more uniform in files with a lot of textures. A more important reason was that we can use this thumbnail to show a representation of the texture in OpenGL render mode. There is no way to change this behavior, all texture thumbnails are generated this way now.

[terry harrison]

Dear Dave

Seems like a bad move to me. Now metal chrome plate just looks like flat cool grey, metal silver plate just looks like flat warm grey, plastic injected just looks like a flat mid grey etc etc.

It's now much less intuitive because you cannot get any immediate impression, from the resource browser, of reflectivity, shine, texture or any of their properties at all in fact.

Ah well...